A blog about poetry, literature, and art, that occasionally engages other issues of importance and interest.

Friday, January 19, 2007

Donald Britton, 1951-1994

The poet Donald Britton died of AIDS in 1994, after publishing one slim volume, Italy, in 1981 with poet and novelist Dennis Cooper's Little Caesar Press. That book is long out of print by now; that press, long defunct. Britton's poems are full of vivid yet subtle language and a wistful reticence, a sense of romance all the more powerfully affecting for its muted understatement. While clearly in the line of John Ashbery, who was a mentor of his in New York City, Britton’s poems have a greater intimacy even in their distances, and a verbal glamour the more enchanting for its modesty.

Donald Britton’s poems frequently explore not just what it might mean to be someone else, but what it might mean to be no one, or everyone. While there is often an “I,” that pronoun sometimes serves as no more than a point of view, a place from which the poem sets out. The “you” that flickers in and out of the poems can be the beloved, a friend, a doppelganger, or the reader, or all of them by turns. There is thus, despite the poems’ lack of a defined self, a sense of intimacy, and an emotional openness made more effective by the surface reticence.

Many of Donald Britton’s poems do not have immediately identifiable “topics”: they are not subject-centered in either sense of the word. Britton doesn’t usually write about himself, but rather about states of mind as it moves through the world. The mind which these poems explore is particular and even individual, but it is not personalized in the post-Confessional manner, but abstracted and generalized, as in Ashbery's work, which is the single strongest influence on Britton's poetry. (Ashbery wrote a blurb for Italy, as did the novelist Edmund White.) For Britton, selfhood was something best dispersed or at least shared. This refusal to hold onto the self as a personal possession may be the source of the paradoxical intimacy of these seemingly impersonal poems.

Britton is almost unknown today (he is not listed in Contemporary Authors, nor in any reference works except two for which I have written about him), but I have assembled a selected poems volume of his work titled (after a line in one of his poems) A Kind of Endlessness. This manuscript includes Italy, In the Empire of the Air, his unpublished second collection, and a sheaf of uncollected and unpublished poems. Work dies if it isn’t read (though like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White it can be awakened by a reader’s kiss), and I would like to keep Britton's work alive. I am currently seeking a publisher for this project.

White Space

Beginning where words drop offIn a remnant of music too simpleFor speech. I walked back and forthAcross the park as between two worlds,Neither of them mine, like oneEmerging from one dream into anotherDream, and so on and so forth;Autumn arriving with heavy breathingAnd giant billboard applesAnd a kind of built-in auspiciousnessThreshing the air like applause.

The austerity of the settingAnd the mind’s horniness might produceA fresh coordination of the accents,As though a behind-the-scenesExplanation of their workings werePossible if not forthcoming. Horns,Timbrels, harmonicas, flexatones:These could contribute to the dinEven now loosening robes of silenceOver Mouseville, pouring into a pauseEndlessly prolonging itself

Out of the time that used to beLeft over for the give-and-takeOf ordinary life, mowing the lawn,Polishing brass, etc. Now “earthBlankets herself with the seaAfter mating with the sky and the sonsOf earth penetrate the mother in death.”From this, a museum must rise,Flawless and inevitable as the snowThat chills the feet of walking statues:Receive a horrible birth.

Capital Life

Too much like one who bears a resemblanceBut is not who he is taken for,As in dreams the ideal is written in every line.Or as one roaming hither and thither

Across the surface of the earth seekingPerfect and autonomous quiet in whichTo pronounce those syllables he knows: thatThere are endless styles but only one subject

And this is it. Yet blankness still invadesThe side of a wall, nailing you hypnoticallyTo a single course of actionWhose consequences spangle prematurely

Like morning vapors washing their burdenOf light through bamboo shades. Perhaps.But does the ability to count presupposeSome grander, intuitive understanding

Of mathematics, or does one just get byWith plain addition and subtractionAnd the sang froid of one’s convictions?Or are these numbers like signs from God,

Clear yet inexplicable, denoting the in-betweenStates of being and aspiring to the conditionOf a bookmark, dividing the knownFrom the unknown, neutral with respect to each?

When the time has come to speak, with whatExcuse will we deny ourselves the opportunity,Choosing silence rather than an inferiorBlessedness, as if we might never grow up,

But extend the prologue so long that it becomesThe tale itself, as so much cautious preparationLeading to a description of breathlessness,White porticoes? A kind of endlessness.

In Ballet, You Are Always a “Boy”

In ballet, you are always a “boy,”Growing up into unmade suitsWhose sleeves will denyAny knowledge of you. For the dayIs wide, yet fixed, a streamEddying into smudge mist,Seemingly pencilled inBeneath the sky’s magnesium flash,Though more real than the griefYou cannot yet have remembered—Whistled or hummed. Later,When we have less time, we may knowWhat we know now in an altered lightThat bleeds from below, stairsBurning above, passing a wintry duskIn the ordinary way,And feel reappear in a breezeFloating about a columnThe close, the familiar moisture,The unheeding fluidityOf the old days and years.

I remember Donald Britton's death vividly because he died in the same year as Assotto Saint and several months before Essex Hemphill. After David Wojnarowicz's death two years before it seemed that all of the brilliant gay poets and writers that I admired since 1986 were passing.

Perhaps these presses may be interested (and forgive me if you already know about them):

Thank you for the post. Donald Britton was an incredible man of great talent. His was my friend in college and he shared his earliest poems with me for which I still feel honored. I am saddened by his death albeit 14 years removed and wish you the best in your efforts. KevinD

Thank you for this post about Donald. I knew him growing up and became close friends with him in college (the University of Texas at Austin) where he was my brother's roommate. He was a wonderful man and one of the funniest people I have ever met. We both moved to NYC in 1979 and I saw him occasionally there, but lost touch after I returned to Texas.

He was always passionate about his writing and I am thrilled to find that others are keeping his poetry alive.

About Me

Reginald Shepherd is the editor of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press, 2004) and of Lyric Postmodernisms (Counterpath Press, 2008). He is the author of: Fata Morgana (2007), winner of the Silver Medal of the 2007 Florida Book Awards, Otherhood (2003), a finalist for the 2004 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Wrong (1999), Angel, Interrupted (1996), and Some Are Drowning (1994), winner of the 1993 Associated Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry (all University of Pittsburgh Press). Shepherd's work has appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry and two Pushcart Prize anthologies, as well as in such journals as American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Yale Review. It has also been widely anthologized. He is also the author of Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (Poets on Poetry Series, University of Michigan Press). Shepherd has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, the Florida Arts Council, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other awards and honors.